Alleged Murderer Is an Illegal Alien, but Washington Post Won't Say So

As so often is the case, the murder suspect on the front page of today's Washington Post is an illegal alien, but the paper does not report it.

It was a particularly brutal, senseless murder of a good samaritan by an illegal from Guatemala, a now 27-year-old man. Julio Miguel Blanco Garcia was in a suburban Virginia shopping center with his one-year-old daughter; he asked a woman, apparently a stranger to him, to drive him to the hospital. She agreed; she made a wrong turn and this caused Garcia, apparently crazed by drugs, to think she was about to turn him in to the police. He then repeatedly stabbed her with a knife, as he told police investigators.

Julio Miguel Blanco Garcia

The car crashed. Garcia then crawled out to the sunlight, pulled his child out, and walked away from the scene, leaving the driver to die. That was back in 2010, and the murder remained an open case until late last year.

Solving the crime was the result of diligent, routine police work. Fingerprints of someone other than the victim, Vanessa Pham, were lifted from both the murder knife and the wrecked car and entered into the system. Years later, the same fingerprints showed up on some bottles of champagne that Garcia had sought to steal; Garcia was picked up by the Fairfax County (Va.) police, and in the ensuing interview confessed to the crime.

All of these details were revealed this week, according to the Post, in a set of court filings made public by the prosecution prior to Garcia's forthcoming trial. The electronic version of the Post story carried a link to the original police report of the interview with Garcia, which can be seen here.

Neither the police report, which said that Garcia had come to the United States in 2002 and gave other personal details about him, nor the Post article, revealed his illegal presence in the United States. Most other reporting also ignored his civil status. However, a local e-news operation, the Fairfax City Patch, did report that a hold had been placed on Garcia by ICE. That agency had identified him as an illegal alien.

Garcia, according to the Post, had been arrested several times prior to the murder; had he simply been deported after any one of these arrests, Ms. Pham would be alive today.

The non-mention of illegal alien status is one of the mainstream media's many subtle techniques used, all in the name of political correctness, to blur the news of the impact of illegal immigration on the United States.

Unfortunately, as we saw with the Fairfax County police report, many local police departments have, similarly, played down the variable of illegal presence in the country.

A couple of years ago I served on a grand jury for Arlington County, Va., which lies between Washington, D.C., and Fairfax County. When a police officer made a presentation to us about a given crime there was never a mention of legal or illegal status. When I asked about that variable the answer was given by the officer — but it was never volunteered. There were many instances of illegal aliens committing crimes in the county.

I am grateful to William Chip, a CIS Board Member, for calling the Garcia case to my attention.

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985.
It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic,
fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.